How 'Stop Words' Can Affect Your SEO, And Also Revenue If You Are A Publisher

When you have a website, you need to have contents to highlight its purpose.

You have to write sentences and paragraphs to show that intention. But in order to really appeal search engines, not only you have to research keywords to know what they like, but you also need to know what they don't like.

One of them, is 'stop words'.

For most search engines, a stop word is a commonly used word that they have been programmed to ignore, which happens before or after processing of natural language data. So when search engines are indexing your website and searching for words to occupy their database, they filter out certain words from their index entry.

Search engines have been known to have a list of stop words. While never officially published, and there is no single universal list of stop words used by all natural language processing tools, those words aren't indexed because they deem to be irrelevant for search purposes, and also to save space in the database and speed up the crawling/indexing process.

Some examples of stop words in English include: the, is, at, which, on, and also include common words like hello, about, he, they, thanks, help and many many more.

Stop words are usually included on contents to optimize the text. Often from a reader's point-of-view, stop words can make text much more readable than an optimized text for a keyword which doesn't use them.

But for search engines, things don't flow as smooth as that.

Read: How Google Search Works, And How It Can Show You The Things You Want

Understanding stop words is important because it will help you in creating contents for your website that search engines will truly understand.

In theory, the lesser stop words you use, the more words search engines will be able to crawl and index, resulting a better understanding of you content. But for Google, the search engine has become much more capable in dealing with stop words, especially since releasing the Hummingbird algorithm update. Here, Google becomes very capable in handling longer search phrases.

In short, Google has become capable in reading text, similar to the way human does. But it doesn't mean that you should stop optimizing your text content with lesser stop words.

Besides making your content less appealing to search engines, having too many stop words can also affect your SEO efforts, especially when it is used on your website's title. Too many stop words will waste valuable space and characters. Other places you need to consider, include your website URLs, Meta Description and image ALT text.

And if you are a publisher of advertising program (like AdSense, which is Google's), too many stop words can also affect your ads' performance.

One example is preventing ads from appearing on certain pages.

Using too many stop words (including common swear words and others that aren't family safe) may prevent Google from showing ads on the page. Those reputed stop words will cause Google to show a blank ad block on your page, or show PSAs (Public Service Ads) to be substituted, instead of normal AdWords ads.

If you're a publisher that rely on ads for revenue, blank ads or PSAs won't pay you any money. But for PSAs, they also count as impressions, thereby diluting your AdSense statistics, and degrading your search engine marketing efforts.

For these reasons, stop words should always be on your list of words you need to take care of (optimizing them, or just remove them accordingly).